The Death Penalty, Revisited

This article, in this morning New York Times, is worth reading.

Aversion to Death Penalty, but No Lack of Cases

By ALAN FEUER

They are an ignominious bunch: two Bronx heroin dealers who murdered an informant, a father and son who killed three people in a drug deal, a Brooklyn gangster hired in the killing of a husband for the victim’s wife.

These five men are linked not only by the nature of their crimes but by the fact that federal juries in New York decided that they should not be put to death.

In the 20 years since the federal death penalty statute was revived, no federal juries have been more reluctant to sentence federal defendants to death than those in New York. According to records compiled by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which coordinates the defense of capital punishment cases, federal prosecutors in New York State have asked juries to impose death sentences 19 times since 1988. In only one case did a jury rule for execution.

Nationwide, federal prosecutors win death penalties about one-third of the time, according to the group’s statistics.

But despite this track record, the cases have not stopped coming: In Brooklyn alone, there are six more capital cases on the docket this year, including those of a reputed Mafioso and of two men charged with killing Guyanese immigrants to collect their life insurance policies. The first of these trials — of Gilberto Caraballo, a Brooklyn drug dealer convicted last month of murdering two rivals — will enter its so-called penalty phase on Monday.

Federal judges in New York have gone so far as to call some death penalty cases a waste of time and money. Last week, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn told prosecutors that their chances of obtaining a death sentence against a drug dealer charged with dismembering two rivals were “virtually nil” and issued an order in which he said he was waiting for the Justice Department to reconsider whether to pursue an execution.

[The rest is here.]